Do you remember the last time you talked to tech support? How about a pleasant experience? That's what I don't remember. Therefore, the first time at my first job, I often had to repeat to myself that my work is important and useful. Then I just came to support. I want to share my experience in choosing a profession and the conclusions that I would be glad to read before I got a job myself. (Spoiler: support is cool).
Experienced IT people are unlikely to find something interesting for themselves, but if you are just discovering the IT world, then welcome under cat.
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All my childhood I spent playing computer games, combining them with awkward attempts to socialize. Back in school, I started trying to program, but quickly realized that it was not my thing. Nevertheless, I went to university for an IT specialty, where I realized that there are other areas in IT besides a programmer. By the end of the university, I already clearly understood that I wanted to go to the admin. The infrastructure attracted me much more than the code, so when it came time to look for a job, I did not even hesitate.
However, it was not possible to become an administrator without work experience. For some reason, everyone wanted someone who could do it to deal with the IT infrastructure, or they offered to solve tasks of the “give-bring” level. Without despair, I looked for options, until a friend told me how, after a year of work in hosting support, he trained himself to a sufficient level to become a sysadmin.
At that time, I knew what technical support was only from the experience of personal communication with employees of various call centers. The degree of usefulness of such communication seemed to me zero. I immediately liked the idea of working with hardware and its settings, but I perceived work in support as a sad period of life that I just had to go through. I mentally prepared myself for useless tasks, impenetrable clients and disrespect from the outside. real IT people.
However, I quickly realized that technical support is one of the most important parts of the modern IT business. No matter what the company offers - IaaS, PaaS, whatever-as-a-service - customers will always have questions and bugs, and someone will have to handle them anyway. I’ll make a reservation right away that we are talking about technical support for 2+ lines, and not about call centers.
Technical support hello
I started my journey in the support of a well-known Russian hosting, which was famous for its technical support. There I quickly encountered what I feared: clients and their problems. It turned out that the client may not understand what he wants, he may not understand what his problem is, he may not even understand whom he is addressing. I came across people who asked to explain by phone in a nutshell how the Internet works or were interested in why they need hosting if they don’t need anything from the Internet. But, despite the different level of questions, it is necessary to answer all. And if you started to answer, then you can’t end the conversation and leave the problem - even an elementary one - unresolved. Of course, even with a simple problem, a person can be sent to write a ticket, but he is unlikely to like to receive an unsubscribe line and a half long. In a day.
Then I realized another truth: technical support is the face of the company. Moreover, a person encounters him in a rather extreme situation: when everything is already broken, breaking right before his eyes, or is about to begin to break. As a result, impressions of communication and quality of care will be passed through the prism of stress. That is why the support employee must know the product of his company well enough. Agree, no client would like to explain to the people from the technical support to whom he turned for help how the equipment purchased by him or his company works. Frantically googling while communicating with a client is also below average pleasure, although this happens.
Another important point that I overlooked is that support can greatly facilitate and speed up the work of other employees of the company. If the support collects the necessary information and formulates the correct requests to the engineers, then this greatly saves the time of developers and administrators. Does this mean that the support employee simply relays questions to real IT people? No! Because often an experienced support specialist understands the product better than developers who are only responsible for their specific area. It is precisely due to this understanding that people from support can formulate a correct request to developers without forcing them to understand the problem themselves.
From this follows another, the most important moment for me. By and large, support is a forge of personnel. Often in the process of solving client problems, there is an understanding that in the current structure it is possible to change, correct or make it more convenient. For example, script routine actions or set up monitoring. Such a mixture of client tasks, own ideas and free time gradually forges a real techie out of a university graduate.
Enterprise & Legacy
In the end, I realized that this work is much more serious than I thought before. The attitude towards her has also changed. When I was called to work in L3 support at Dell Technologies, I started to get a little worried. And after I heard terrible words like “enterprise” and “legacy” at the interview, I began to draw in my head all the worst that can be associated with this. A big gray corporation, customers are the same big gray corporations, stale technologies, narrow development and gear people closed in themselves. There was also the realization that requests would be sent to me not by clients who do not understand what they need, but by other engineers who, on the contrary, know it very well. They no longer care so much about the face of the company they interact with. For them, it is much more important that the product that fell at night is repaired with the least financial losses.
The reality turned out to be much nicer than the expectations. Ever since my night support days, I've learned that sleep is important. And since studying at the university - that a person can have things to do during working hours. Therefore, I perceived the transition from a shift schedule (which was needed for a master's degree) to a full-fledged 5/2 as something threatening. Leaving to work in the “gray enterprise”, I almost resigned myself to the fact that I would no longer have personal time in the light of the sun. And I was very happy when I realized that you can come when it is convenient, and if it is not convenient, then you can work from home. From that moment on, the idea of Dell Technologies as a gray enterprise began to wane.
Why? First, because of the people. I immediately noticed that I don’t see here the type that I’m used to seeing everywhere: people who ok and so. Someone really just gets tired of developing and the level at which he stopped is suitable for him. Someone is dissatisfied with their work and considers it beneath their dignity to invest in it to the fullest. There are not many of them, but such people made a strong and far from the best impression on my young brain. By the time I got a job at Dell Technologies, I had changed 3 jobs and managed to convince myself that this is the normal state of affairs for any position and specialty. It turned out - no. After meeting my new colleagues, I realized that I was finally surrounded by people who always want to do something. "Finally" - because such people necessarily begin to work as sources of external motivation.
Secondly, I changed my mind because of the management. It seemed to me that friendly management is typical for small companies, and in large ones, especially those that handle serious money, it is easier to stumble upon a vertical of power. Therefore, here I expected strictness and discipline. But instead, I saw a completely sincere desire to help and participate in your development. And the very opportunity to speak on an equal footing with more experienced specialists or managers creates an atmosphere in which you want to try and learn something new, and not work only within the framework of job descriptions. When I realized that the company was also interested in my development, one of my main fears - the fear of not learning anything in support - began to leave me.
At first, I thought about working in L3 support as working with such a narrow area that this knowledge would not be useful anywhere else. But, as it turned out, even when working with a narrow area and a proprietary product, to some extent you have to interact with its environment - at least the operating system, as a maximum - with an infinite number of programs of varying complexity. Digging into the operating system in search of the cause of a particular error, you can personally encounter its low-level mechanics, instead of reading about them in books without understanding how it works and why it is needed.
Laying out on shelves
The work in support was not at all what I expected. At one time I was worried a lot, so I want to formulate a few theses that I would be glad to hear myself when I got my first job.
- Technical support is the face of the company. In addition to soft-skills, understanding what exactly you represent your company right now helps to build professional guidelines for yourself.
- Technical support is an important help for colleagues. Robert Heinlein wrote that specialization is for insects. Perhaps this is true for the XNUMXth century, but now in IT everything is different. In an ideal team, the developer will mainly write the code, the administrator will be responsible for the infrastructure, and it is better to deal with bugs with support.
- Technical support is a forge of personnel. A kind of place where you can come with almost no knowledge and soon learn everything that any IT specialist needs to know.
- Technical support is a good place where you can gain knowledge in various areas. Even when working with corporate software, one way or another, you will have to interact with its environment.
And, by the way, the enterprise is not so scary. Often large companies can afford to choose not just strong technical specialists, but professionals who are also pleasant to work with.
Literature
One of the biggest problems for me was to understand how you can develop during periods of calm, when there are no specific tasks. Therefore, I want to recommend a couple of books that helped me a lot to understand Linux:
- Unix and Linux. System Administrator's Guide. Evy Nemeth, Garth Snyder, Trent Hein, Ben Whaley
- Linux internals. Ward Bryan
Thank you for your attention! I hope this article will help someone understand that support is really important, and stop doubting the choice of their path.
Source: habr.com